Monday, October 19, 2009

One of her jobs (besides playing Farmtown online) is to fax my notes to other physicians' offices. So late this morning she had a bunch of them to send.

Around 11:30 the girls decided to order lunch from Chipotle, and faxed over an order. Mary went to pick it up.

While she was out I fished the fax confirmation sheet from Chipotle out of the trash, along with some of the medical office fax confirms on my patient notes. I doctored them up to make it look like she'd accidentally faxed all the patient notes to Chipotle. I put them on her desk, and went back to my office.

When she found them she was frantic for about a minute. Then she came back here to kill me.

I used to work at a store in a mall. We mostly sold "educational" kids' toys.

For some reason, at least one person who worked for Kaiser Permanente used to give out our fax number as the number for people to fax medical records when appealing Kaiser's decision not to pay for medical treatment.

Every so often, we would come in in the morning and there would be somebody's medical records in the fax machine.

I called Kaiser and got a "supervisor" who claimed that she knew who was giving out the wrong number but couldn't do anything to stop it.

I called every patient (or parents of patients who were children) whose contact information I could find. (On shifts I didn't work, though, nobody else called. That really bugged me. The idea that someone would get stuck paying a perfectly reasonable medical bill just because Kaiser was having appeals sent to the mall seemed really unfair.) Invariably, they were grateful.

I started out calling hospitals and doctor's offices if I couldn't find patient contact information. Those almost always devolved into threats of legal action for having the nerve to intercept faxes from them to Kaiser. I quit calling hospitals and doctors' offices. I was paid to do other things than listen to harangues from people who didn't understand how faxing worked when I first came in in the morning.

And of course we ended up just throwing the files out, rather than buying the expensive kind of shredder the hospitals insisted we get in order to prevent any more breaches of confidentiality on top of our interception of their faxes.

I think your story is hilarious. (I wish I worked for you too.) But I'm also really glad that Mary was frantic for a moment at the thought of faxing patient records to Chipotle.

Magnus tried to do the right thing. That's precisely why there is a niggling of doubt about everything going all e-records. It's great between the docs (and pharmacists that have to reconcile the perpetuity of prescriptions), but when the HIPAA stuff gets in the wrong hands...really, I thought the original intent of HIPAA was to avoid selling of private information between vendors and ultimately denial of insurance benefits from 'getting something on Maggie Marmelstein'.

I love Neurologists, they have the best personalities, and very frequently the best sense of humor. Endocrine, and surgery, on the other hand not so much. I hate to say it, I agree that frequently the best part about practical jokes is knowing that you are going to get it back. Then again; I think that my grades in college would have been much better sans the time wasted on the very elaborate, and frequently sadistic jocularity.

You'd be surprised at what HIPAAdoesn't cover, like selling Rxrecords. Drug companies use themfor marketing, and eeevilllcompanies like Millman and IHSaggregate them and sell databasesto insurance companies so theycan more easily deny you coverage.

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

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